Part 1
‘Teaching History with Human Connections’
Teaching history, we often get caught up in the facts (events, places, etc.). We can make the biggest impact with the memorable stories of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. These personal struggles are often what our students remember the most.
Today we visited the Kindertransport Memorials at the train station at Prague.
This is known here as the ‘Winton Train’ after Sir Nicholas Winton, a Briton who helped save hundreds of Czech Jewish children in 1939 as war was on the horizon.
Part 2
Part of this memorial is a Paine of glass (train window) with adult hands on the outside and child hands on the inside reaching towards each other. We know most would never see each other again. It conveys the desperation of this time in history. It hits hard.
Part 3
My middle school classes learn about the Kindertransport. We read the true story ‘The Children of Willesden Lane’ in which a young girl (Lisa) and her 9-year-old sister Sonya are sent to Britain just before the war – they would never see their parents again. The memorial we witnessed today in Prague reminds me of a passage from the end of the book in which Lisa (after the war) recalls all the generous things people have done for her. She thanked “… every mother and father who had the courage to save their child by saying goodbye”.